The Poverty of Affluence. Paul Wachtel

the rest of us—both in respect and in their share of the goods we are all taught to clamor for—they will feel poor. Growth is no substitute for greater equality. It may be tempting to think that growth can provide an easy way out of facing questions about the justice of present arrangements, but such questions will not go away. Growth proponents pose as hard-headed realists. But their vision of buying off the poor with the crumbs from their table is in fact a dangerously naive fantasy, no matter how sugar-coated the crumbs or grand the table.

      * The number of older people (and probably, therefore, the number of retired) is likely to continue to increase for a while. But when the “baby boom” generation enters its economic prime, the percentage of younger, less skilled workers in the work force should decrease substantially.

      * I am not considering here the possibility of a nuclear war, which would of course plunge us far indeed below 1958 levels of comfort, and which is made more likely by the very habits of mind I am criticizing in this book.

      * It is a shameful fact that for a minority of our population this is not the case—though even here the difference between American “poverty” and Third World “subsistence” is important to understand if one is to be helpful (see below)

      * I will have more to say later about the limitations of such measures as gross national product and how they lead us astray.

      * Some argue that we help developing nations most effectively, and least paternalistically, not by giving aid but simply by trading with them—that it is the essence of trade that it benefits both parties to it. Chapter Twelve will examine more closely the difficulties with such thinking.

      THREE

      The Unperceived Realities of the Consumer Life

      IN THE WORDS OF NOBEL economics laureate Herbert Simon, the basic model of economics posits that each person has “a complete and consistent system of preferences that allows him always to choose among the alternatives open to him; he is always completely aware of what his alternatives are; there are no limits on the complexity of the computations he can perform in order to determine which alternatives are best.”¹ Most economists agree that such a description of human behavior is not realistic but regard it as a close enough approximation to be useful. Doubtless for certain purposes it is. But I will stress here another perspective that yields quite a different picture. I have already indicated some of the ways in which our thinking about the economic side of our lives is less realistic and less rational than we like to believe. In this chapter I shall consider some further ways in which we blur our experience or practice self-delusion about our lives as consumers.

      Our economy absolutely requires that we nurture illusions if it is to persist in its present ways. Our image of what things mean to us and the homilies we share and repeat to each other have become increasingly at odds with the realities of our daily lives. We magnify the satisfactions our material pursuits bring, while the sacrifices are either blotted out or reinterpreted in ways that make what we’re doing seem to make sense.

      To the psychotherapist, such a dedication by people to precisely the way of life that causes their distress is a familiar phenomenon. Irony and self-deception are abundant in the behavior patterns he studies. The psychotherapist’s perspective is less superficially reassuring than the Panglossian circle of mainstream economics, which defines our real preferences as revealed—conveniently—by precisely what we buy. But there is something to be gained if one persists in the effort to examine experience a bit more closely than one’s grocery list permits—perhaps not only self-knowledge but even the possibility of a kind of liberation considerably more satisfying than simply being “free to choose” what is on the shelves.

      The Automobile as Dream Machine

      Let us begin our examination of the self-deceptions of the consumer life by looking at the role of automobiles in our lives. Few products have had as powerful a role in shaping the way we live, for both good and ill, and few so strongly define and limit what options appear available to us. Moreover, few products have aroused such a complex of emotions in us or become so utterly indispensable to our way of life. The French semiologist Roland Barthes has even provocatively suggested that “cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals … the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”²

      In Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood we find one character saying “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.” Joyce Carol Oates says about the frame of mind of one of her characters, “As long as he had his own car he was an American and could not die.” And lest one think such statements appear only in fiction, one finds in a New York Times article on the effects of energy shortages on people’s lives the following statement by a social worker who had switched from solo driving to a car pool: “That first week of the car pool, when I knew my car was not out in the parking lot, I felt like I had lost an arm or something.”³

      In America cars have been the lifeblood of the society of growth; it is not without reason that roads and highways are referred to as arteries.^* Even those who live in cities, where automobiles may seem less of a necessity, depend for their very lives on the flow of automotive traffic. The seductive pull of the automobile-aided by huge government investments in a comprehensive highway system—has led to the atrophy of rail transportation, and since few of us grow our own food, we count on trucks and roads for the necessities of life.

      Automobiles have reshaped our landscape, both geographically and culturally. At a time when few of us could see that the genie in the bottle looked very much like a smirking OPEC sheik, and when most of us probably thought that hydrocarbon emissions had something to do with putting bubbles in soft drinks, America took to the open road. Taking full advantage of our vast continent, we pushed ahead toward one last frontier—the relatively open spaces that surrounded our cities even after the Pacific had been reached and settled. The westward push that had dominated America’s consciousness and expressed her vitality for so many years was replaced by an outward push. In every city, East and West, we expressed our expansiveness in this new way, forsaking the clustered way of life that had characterized city life for thousands of years. We created instead a new kind of city, freed from the old constraints imposed by time and distance. The automobile seemed to provide us with a way of keeping in touch, of sustaining the critical mass that is required for a lively culture, and yet enjoying as well the greenery and open space that we have always envisioned as Eden. Now, having tasted of the fruits of OPEC, we are threatened with expulsion from Eden—or perhaps, in the modern case, with house arrest instead of exile: Without the car, how could we get around? The structure of our living, shopping, and working arrangements seems to make the private automobile absolutely indispensable.

      Automobiles are the core of our economy as well. Daniel J. Boorstin, historian and Librarian of Congress, asserts, “We cannot understand what we mean in America by competition or by monopoly, by advertising, by industrial leadership, or by know-how, unless we have understood the role of the automobile.”⁴ One in six jobs in America are directly or indirectly related to the automobile (not just in building them, but in selling, distributing, and servicing them; mining or producing the materials; drilling for, refining, and distributing the fuel for them; and so on).⁵ Every twenty-four hours we add 10,000 new drivers and 10,000 new cars to our roads.⁶ Estimates of how much of the average American’s income goes to support his automobile—not just in paying for the car, but in interest payments, insurance, repairs, parking, tolls, fuel, taxes, and so forth—range from one out of ten to almost one out of every four dollars spent.⁷ Indeed, our social fabric seems to be constructed out of automobile parts.

      But automobiles are more than just a necessity to us. They are a way of life. Our involvement with them is more than just a matter of practicality; they serve us as a symbol of freedom, strength, speed, and adventure. Perhaps one of the reasons that solo driving to and from work has continued so persistently in the face of serious impracticalities is that it is so conducive to fantasy. Cars are our personal dream machines,